Things that pop into my head

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iPhone queuing

Last year iPhone 4 came out less than 24 hours before we were due to sail to Holland. This meant only one thing. I desperately wanted that fabby screen and camera and hadn’t pre ordered – so queuing it was.

My PA got up in the middle of the night so I could get there at the crack of dawn. Ok, actually I got to Bluewater at 7 or 8. Can’t really remember. Think I was still asleep. The mall was silent with the odd security guard opening the doors for the Apple nuts. Oh yeah, that would include me, right. So I trundled to the Apple store bypassing the lines of people at the phone stores. Demand and supply wasn’t matching – we were about to get in line for what turned out to be about 6 or 7 hours. I can’t remember exactly how long. An eternity? It was baking hot under the mall glass roof, people were taking over half an hour to make the purchase and spirits were not that high! No great buzz just people quietly blogging on laptops and tweeting how many inches they had moved in the last hour.

I think the thing I remember most is, in the hundred deep queue, there were only a few females. I appeared to be the only wheelchair user so I scored a double hit on the minority scale.

By late afternoon, after nearly passing out from the free coffee and heatstroke, I returned home with my new phone. I just got one before they ran out.